Earnings Announcement and Stock Prices of Quoted Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria in the Era of COVID-19 Pandemic

The study examined the effectiveness of the signaling theory and the efficient market hypothesis in Nigeria during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic which has been an underexplored investigation in the Nigerian capital market. The broad objective of the study was to assess how earning announcements could affect the stock prices of deposit money banks in Nigeria. Specifically, the study sought to analyse the trend of stock prices and examine the reactions of stock prices of quoted DMBs to earnings announcements during a pandemic period in Nigeria. The study employed secondary data from daily closing stock prices of 13 selected banks and the All Share Index (ASI) between 2019 and 2020, sourced from the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The Log-in model, Event-study methodology and the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test were used to analyse the data. The event-study methodology employed the market model to estimate the expected returns and abnormal returns during the event window. For the weak form of the market efficiency test, ADF was used to test for the presence of unit roots in the time series. Findings from the study showed that 69.23% of banks' stocks in the Nigerian capital market had negative growth, while 30.77% had positive growth during the period. That abnormal returns around announcement days were not statistically significant as abnormal returns of banks that announced an increase or decrease in earnings were -0.01007 (-0.00533) with t-stat values of -0.30355 (-0.16428) respectively. The implication of the findings is that investors could not earn cumulative abnormal returns during the event window and the abnormal returns of most of the banks had an inverse relationship with earnings announcements. Based on these findings, the study recommended, amongst others, that investors should avoid mispriced stocks while investing in index funds in order to earn market average returns and that regulatory authorities should monitor banks listed on the Nigerian stock exchange to guard against abuse of insider information to the detriment of investors.